Read Online Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff - Free Book Online Page B

watch
all
of it,” Fallon said. “If you like baseball. Or
The Sandlot.
Have you ever seen
The Sandlot
?”
    â€œNo.” Talking baseball movies was way better than weird scar stories, but I was still trying to figure out which was worse, eating lunch with Fallon or starving in a bathroom stall.
    â€œI have both of them,” Fallon said. “You could come over and watch with me sometime.”
    I choked on the last of my sandwich when she said that.
    â€œYou okay, Trent?” she asked. She looked like she was about to start giving me the Heimlich, right there in the cafeteria, so I nodded and downed some apple juice until she seemed to believe I wasn’t going to die. “Well, what do you think? Want to come over sometime?”
    I was still coughing a little bit, so luckily I didn’t have to answer right away.
    Here’s what I knew for sure: Fallon wasn’t asking me over to her house, as, like, a
date
or anything. I’d seen the way girls acted when they liked boys that way (heck, hang out with Aaron for more than three seconds and you’d see plenty of it), and that wasn’t the way Fallon seemed to be acting.
    She seemed, if I really thought hard about it, like she wanted to be my friend.
    But here’s the thing I couldn’t figure out: Why
me
? Out of all the kids at Cedar Haven Middle, why me? I wasn’t particularly funny, or nice, even, and I was good at sports, but Fallon didn’t seem to care so much about that.
    â€œMaybe,” I told her. “Probably not.”
    Fallon nodded as she took another bite of her apple, like that was exactly the answer she expected. “Okay,” she said. And she grinned, apple flecks showing in her mouth. “Then how ’bout you draw me a picture?”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    I thought about breaking another one of Ms. Emerson’s plants, just to get detention, but I figured two phone calls in one week might be too much for my mom. Also, the wrinkled old crone would probably just kill me instead. (I’d been ignoring her, mostly, in class. Not answering questions, scribbling thoughts instead of doing homework, that sort of thing. You could tell the wrinkled old crone hated me back, because she didn’t seem to mind so much about the ignoring.)
    Anyway, there were other ways to miss dinner.
    First I went to the Episcopal church on Summit Avenue, becausethey had the best parking lot for practicing wheelies. Then I biked down Bufflehead Lane (mostly because I really liked the word
bufflehead
) and wound my way in and around the fallen leaves on the street, until an old lady honked her horn at me and told me to stop being a nuisance on her block. Then I biked past the high school, where someone had set up a collection of lawn gnomes from who knows where on the front lawn. After a while I wandered over to Knickerbocker, although I pedaled really fast as I passed the Richardses’ house. I soared down Maple Hill, closing my eyes, for just a second, as I went. There was just enough wind pushing me back against the road that between the pushing and the soaring, I could almost believe I was flying.
    Floating.
    Two tacos, that’s what I had for dinner. They were two for five dollars if you got them from the take-out window of Rosalita’s. Mom and I picked food up there a lot when we were working late at Kitch’N’Thingz, because it was right down the block, and Marjorie, who ran the window, was always really nice.
    â€œNothing for your mother?” she asked when she handed me the bag.
    I shook my head, sliding five dollars from my shift last weekend across the wood counter. “She might come by later,” I said. Which, then, I wished I hadn’t said, because maybe it would come true and Mom
would
go over, and then Marjorie would tell her she saw me, and then Mom would be mad that I wasn’t having dinner with my dad like I was supposed to on Wednesday